The TOBIAS test generator and its adaptation to some ASE challenges Position paper for the ASE Irvine Workshop

In the past decade, a scientific community has emerged around the notion of “Automated Software Engineering”. This community has made several advances in two kinds of challenges: the complexity of processing software engineering information, and the difficulty to capture knowledge about software. This position paper first recalls these challenges. It then describes how these challenges influenced the design of the TOBIAS test generation tool. 1 Challenges of ASE research Automated Software Engineering tries to develop software tools that help in the software development activities. Such tools start from digital information and try to produce other digital information for the software engineer. Most of the time, this digital information is a structured or a formal document. Structured or formal documents include: source code, tests, formal specifications, but also semi-formal specifications (e.g. UML diagrams) or structured documents (e.g. XML documents). At longer term, research work on natural language recognition (both spoken and written) may increase the spectrum of potential input documents.